Facebook suspended five accounts linked to Democratic operatives who engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” in a bid to steer votes away from Alabama Republican Roy Moore during last year’s special Senate election. The announcement comes following a New York Times report last week that exposed the scheme, in which the users created a Facebook page and imitated conservative Alabamians who weren’t satisfied with the Republican candidate while encouraging others to write in another candidate. Moore, whose campaign ultimately was clouded by allegations of sexual misconduct with teenage girls while he was in his 30s, ended up losing the race to...

The Alabama attorney general on Jan. 7, called on federal authorities to investigate the state’s 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall made the announcement after conducting an informal inquiry into reports of a false-flag operation designed to boost Democrat Doug Jones, who defeated Republican Roy Moore by a thin margin in a hotly contested race. The New York Times reported in December that a secret social media operation funded by billionaire Democratic donor Reid Hoffman directed thousands of accounts designed to appear like Russian bots to follow Moore. A Facebook page then falsely portrayed...

Two Obama-era officials were instrumental in the false flag operation in Alabama ahead of the special election in 2017, reports show. One of the Obama-era officials behind the misinformation campaign in Alabama finally opened up about his group’s role in the caper. Two of the people involved in the social media misinformation campaign in Alabama are denying their roles in the operation, reports indicate. A trove of reports show two Obama-era officials are partially responsible for a misinformation campaign designed to derail Republican Roy Moore’s senatorial campaign in Alabama. Former President Barack Obama campaign organizer, Mikey Dickerson, was instrumental in...

The “Dry Alabama” Facebook page, illustrated with stark images of car wrecks and videos of families ruined by drink, had a blunt message: Alcohol is the devil’s work, and the state should ban it entirely. Along with a companion Twitter feed, the Facebook page appeared to be the work of Baptist teetotalers who supported the Republican, Roy S. Moore, in the 2017 Alabama Senate race. “Pray for Roy Moore,” one tweet exhorted. In fact, the Dry Alabama campaign, not previously reported, was the stealth creation of progressive Democrats who were out to defeat Mr. Moore — the second such secret...

Billionaire LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman put $100,000 into an experiment that adopted Russia-inspired political disinformation tactics on Facebook during last year's special Senate race in Alabama, The New York Times reports. Hoffman did not immediately comment on the report. One of his partners told the Times that Hoffman does not “micromanage” the political projects he funds, and may not have been aware of the project’s tactics. During the 2017 special Senate race in Alabama, the project’s organizers created a fake Facebook page designed to attract conservative Republican voters. Once they had built an audience, the page criticized Republican candidate Roy...

Democratic operatives, backed by a liberal billionaire and facilitated by a former Obama official, created thousands of fake Russian accounts to give an impression the Russian government was supporting Alabama Republican Roy Moore in last year’s election against now-Sen. Doug Jones. The secret project, which had a budget of just $100,000 and was carried out on Facebook and Twitter, was revealed after the New York Times obtained an internal report detailing the efforts. “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the internal report...

"Democratic operatives created thousands of Twitter accounts posing as Russian bots in order to boost Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in the October 2017 special election by linking his Republican opponent, Roy Moore, to Russian influence campaigns." "The operatives, who were funded by liberal billionaire Reid Hoffman independently of Jones’s campaign, created more than a thousand Russian-language accounts that followed Moore’s Twitter account overnight, The New York Times reported Wednesday evening."Link to Daily Caller article: https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/19/democrats-russian-bots-false-flag/Link to Sara Carter Tweet mentioning this article: https://twitter.com/SaraCarterDC/status/1075754546054512643Is Fake News going to ignore this huge developing story?

Interference: In an age when most of the “mainstream media” have abandoned all journalistic ethical standards in a rush to hammer POTUS Donald Trump on a daily basis, there haven’t been many opportunities to praise the legacy press. But The New York Times deserves kudos for a bombshell story the paper published late Wednesday that is, expectedly, being ignored by the other majors. The gist of the story is this: An ‘experiment’ to mimic Russian election meddling via social media manipulation during the 2016 election was launched by Leftist operatives in the Alabama Senate race involving Democrat Doug Jones, the...

As Russia’s online election machinations came to light last year, a group of Democratic tech experts decided to try out similarly deceptive tactics in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate race, according to people familiar with the effort and a report on its results... One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee. An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times,...

In the Nov. 6 elections, residents of Alabma voted overwhelmingly to amend their state constitution to authorize the display of the Ten Commandments on public property, including public schools. The measure, Alabama Amendment 1, also defined certain religious liberty rights to be included in the state's constitution.

Alabama voted Tuesday to amend its state constitution to recognize the “sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children,” clarifying there is no constitutional “right” to abortion in the Yellowhammer State. The amendment would expand legal rights for pre-born children if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned, a possibility about which abortion supporters seem to be increasingly concerned. The amendment will “declare and otherwise affirm that it is the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, most importantly the right to life in all...

Alabama voters proved once again that when people get a chance to go to the polls they generally vote for unborn children. And they did just that tonight by approving a amanemdment saying unborn babies have a right to life. The proposed constitutional amendment asked voters to “affirm that it is the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, most importantly the right to life in all manners and measures appropriate and lawful.” The amendment also would guarantee that “the constitution of this state does not protect...

In upholding a lower court’s fetal-homicide ruling, Alabama Supreme Court justice Tom Parker urged the U.S. Supreme Court to address the “logical fallacy” he believes is inherent in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which established a constitutional right to abortion. Jessie Livell Phillips, who was sentenced to death after being found guilty of a double homicide for killing his pregnant girlfriend, appealed the decision, arguing that the fetus was not legally a separate person, and that he should thus have been charged with one count of homicide instead of two. The Court, however, rejected Phillips’s appeal, finding that...

Jeff Sessions, ousted as President Trump’s attorney general this week, is contemplating a run for his old Alabama Senate seat in 2020 against Democratic Sen. Doug Jones -- though those who know Sessions aren't convinced he will ultimately pull the trigger on another campaign. A source close to the former attorney general told Fox News that Sessions is “considering it but his mind isn't made up.” That person added that Sessions, known for his stances on illegal immigration and trade, “was advocating for the Trump agenda back when it was called the Sessions agenda.” Others, though, don’t see Sen. Sessions...

Facebook is investigating News for Democracy, an organization backed by liberal megadonor Reid Hoffman, over misleading news pages the group operated prior to the 2018 midterm elections, the social network said Monday. News for Democracy created several active Facebook pages that may have broken the social network’s advertising policies and rules against misleading users during the race, The Washington Post reported. **SNIP** Mr. Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder and Microsoft board member, did not return requests for comment, The Post reported. Dmitri Mehlhorn, his top political adviser and a News for Democracy, declined to comment, the report said.

Liberal abuse of Facebook to manipulate elections didn’t stop in 2017. A new Washington Post report indicated the same strategy was widespread in 2018 and earned as many as 16 million views in just a two-week span. Liberal billionaire Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and member of the board of directors for Microsoft, was exposed last week for funding a project that created fake Facebook pages to manipulate the 2017 Alabama special election between Roy Moore and Doug Jones. A new Washington Post article has revealed that the group that created the project, News for Democracy, had created 14 fake...

The co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, has apologized to Republican Roy Moore for funding an organisation that faked a ‘Russian bot’ involvement to mar his election campaign in Alabama. American Engagement Technologies (AET), which Hoffman gave $750,000 to, put $100,000 of the entrepreneur’s money towards New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm which fabricated some 1,000 Russian language Twitter accounts to follow Moore. The company used the tactic to link the controversial Republican to so-called Russian influence campaigns and then fed it to the mainstream media. They also created misleading Facebook pages urging Republicans to support a ‘write-in’ candidate instead of supporting...

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said Thursday that his office is exploring whether disinformation tactics deployed against Republican Roy Moore during last year's special election violated state campaign laws and said he was worried that the operation could have affected the closely fought Senate race. "The information is concerning," Marshall, a Republican, said in a phone interview. "The impact it had on the election is something that's significant for us to explore, and we'll go from there." Moore lost the election to his Democratic rival, Sen. Doug Jones. Marshall, who said he learned of the disinformation campaign called Project Birmingham...

Internet billionaire Reid Hoffman apologized on Wednesday for funding a group linked to a “highly disturbing” effort that spread disinformation during last year’s Alabama special election for U.S. Senate, but said he was not aware that his money was being used for this purpose. Hoffman’s statement is his first acknowledgement of his ties to a campaign that adopted tactics similar to those deployed by Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential election. In Alabama, the Hoffman-funded group allegedly used Facebook and Twitter to undermine support for Republican Roy Moore and boost Democrat Doug Jones, who narrowly won the race. Hoffman, the...

Roughly a year since stories of harassment and discrimination at work started to dominate the headlines, professionals in entertainment say the problems facing their industry are more pervasive than what you might think. This reality surfaces in our survey, in partnership with CNBC’s Closing The Gap series, on the state of gender in the entertainment industry. (The first LinkedIn-CNBC analysis, revealed in June, focused on the gap in the finance industry.) We received more than 1,000 responses from LinkedIn members working in entertainment and the motion picture/film industry in the U.S. (snip)In the charts below, you’ll see that workers in...